Approaching Perpetual Peace: Kant’s Defence of a League of States and his Ideal of a World Federation

The standard view of Kant’s position on international relations is that he advocates a voluntary league of states and rejects the ideal of a world federation of states as dangerous, unrealistic, and conceptually incoherent. This standard view reigns in both the Kant literature and the debates among Kantian political theorists. However much John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas, for example, may disagree over whether Kant is right to defend a voluntary association of states, their dispute is premised on the standard interpretation of Kant’s position. In The Law of Peoples, Rawls’s appeal to Kant’s purported reasons for rejecting the ideal of a world government serves as a theoretical short-cut, relieving him of the task of discussing the desirability of a world federation of states.1 In Habermas’s 1995 essay on Kant’s Perpetual Peace, the case for transforming the United Nations into a cosmopolitan democracy with strengthened coercive powers is preceded by a lengthy argument showing that Kant’s position in Perpetual Peace is riddled with contradictions and that Kant’s own principles should have led him to argue for a federative state of states with coercive powers.